I have known of this queer couple for some time. Both men are contributing members of the community and spend much time helping out in the orphanage. Their two beautiful children, a boy and girl, are the envy of all who are privileged to experience them.
One night, as they were leaving, I noticed tears in their eyes.
They told me, it grieves them they cannot take all the children home with them.
Mamma, it is this experience, more than any other that has caused me to understand the qualifications of a good parent.
There is something terribly wrong with a society that thinks that one’s sex is what makes one a good parent.
Your loving son, Albino”12
Years before the psychiatric world came to the same conclusion, Luciani realized sexual orientation could not be changed by therapy.
As a seminarian, he wrote a paper which brought him bad marks.
Yet, he found unlike sexual orientation, sexual behavior can be conditioned by therapy. He reasoned either of two forces drive a sexual act, love or lust. When people are in love, love tends to drive the act. When people are not in love, lust tends to drive the act.
He reasoned a homosexual male can be conditioned to engage in sex with a woman only by changing the motivating force from love to lust. Yet, he will never be able to truly fall in love with her. He might grow to like her, develop affection for her, parent children with her, but, he will never be able to truly fall in love with her.
Conversely, he had ministered in prisons and found heterosexual men who engaged in homosexual acts. Yet, no matter how long it went on, when a heterosexual male had an intimate relationship with another male he could never fall in love with him.
He concluded one’s God-given instincts cannot be changed.
Strategy of a Strange War13
“Like all animals, we are born with two basic instincts: the instinct of survival, and its adversary, the instinct of compassion.
It is the instinct of survival which moves the newborn puppy out of the womb to the teat. It is his instinct of compassion which causes him to move aside and let his little sister have some too.
These instincts are with us all the days of our lives.
They determine everything we do as everything we do is either done for ourselves or for others.
Though we are scarcely aware of it, an inner struggle goes on within each of us every day of our lives. Each time the fork in the road comes up—often only minutes apart—our instinct of survival tells us, ‘Now what is in this for me?’ Our instinct of compassion tells us something else, ‘Now, what is in this for others?’
Many of our actions are reflections of these basic instincts.
We don’t teach babies what to laugh at or what to cry about. They are born with this instinct, and all babies will laugh at the same things and cry about the same things and they will laugh and cry about these same things for all the remaining days of their lives.
The tendency to fall-in-love is a manifestation of the instinct of compassion. The kind of person one falls-in-love with cannot be changed. It would be like trying to condition a child to laugh when something terrible happens and cry when something wonderful happens.
These instincts are the fabric of the human soul. Although they cannot be changed in this life, it is within our power to weave them into the next life…”13
Whenever the Church’s policies were inhumane, he stepped in.
It was in Italy the Vatican first limited hospital visitation rights to family members. The intent was to keep partners of homosexuals out to facilitate the priest demanding the dying partner renounce his or her loved one. “Otherwise, you will certainly go to hell!”
As a bishop, in defiance of the papal decree, he ordered hospitals within his jurisdiction to admit longtime partners of homosexuals into intensive-care units on at least six occasions reported in the press and, perhaps, many more not reported in the press.14
Across the pond
When civil rights legislation was enacted in the United States in 1964, the Christian right, having lost its quest to keep the black in his corner, turned its hatred toward homosexuals. By the end of the decade millions of homosexuals had been incarcerated—those in northern states for short sentences and those in southern states for long terms. Alabama came within one legislative vote of requiring the death penalty for a single homosexual act in private.
In the wee hours of the morning in the spring of 1967, acting on a tip from a neighbor, police broke into the home of Robert Wise and Timothy Wilson, both 22, outside Augusta Georgia.
Caught in the act, they were tried and sentenced to twenty years. Timothy Wilson served only four days of his term. He cut his wrists and bled to death in his cell on his twenty-third birthday.15
Timothy Wilson did not stand alone in his demise.
During the ensuing quarter-century homosexuality surfaced as the leading cause of suicide in Bible-belt states. Over a quarter of a million gay children and teens, born to parents whose minds were deranged by the hatred of Christian preachers, took their own lives.16
In the spring of 1969, the local newspaper boy delivered a copy of the New York Times to the bishop of Vittorio Veneto. Luciani’s eye caught a headline, “Police Murder Young Gay.” The article was accompanied by a photo. Impaled facedown atop a heavy iron picket fence was a small-framed boy. Though taken at night one could see four or five of the spikes had penetrated his body from his neck to his thigh and that the tips of the spikes were wet with blood.17
As he read the article, he saw the caption was wrong. The boy, a thirteen year old, in critical condition, was still alive. The fence was cut with torches and the teen removed to St. Agnes Hospital with spikes embedded in his body. He had been arrested by an undercover cop in Washington Square and brought to the station for booking.
Fearing disclosure to his parents, the youth pleaded for the police to let him go. When he went to use the restroom two officers were overheard threatening to force themselves on the youngster and the boy was either thrown from or leaped out of a window into the dark of the night and landed atop the fence.
The officers were suspended pending an investigation and were eventually returned to active duty when a witness who occupied a booth testified he had not seen anything; he had only overheard the confrontation and the most he could come up with is that one of the officers used the term, “little faggot.”
Approached by a reporter, Luciani was asked for his assessment, “When religion sanctifies hostility, it erases morality.”18
A week later, the boy died. Infuriated by his death, homosexuals for the first time stood their ground and fought off police in what is remembered today as Stonewall.19 The gay revolution had begun; the prediction Luciani made in his letter to Figaro had become a reality.
Four years later, in December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted the resolution homosexuality is a matter of instinct and not a matter of illness. It ordered its members to begin the work of removing the stigma long been associated with it.20
Luciani, referring to this ruling, got himself into trouble with his flock when he made the remark, “I wonder how long it will take for the sheep to get this one.”
Even after Galileo proved via his Falling Bodies Law the earth was round and rotating on its axis, most Christians continued to believe it was flat because the Bible told them it was flat until years later when Magellan sailed off to the west and returned from the east. Half of them refused to believe it even then.21
“…stamp out what Hitler stood for…”
Despite medical science proved its claim, much of the population, influenced by preachers, continued to believe sexual orientation was a matter of choice. Luciani would often taunt clergy who chose to ignore what the medical community had to say.
Mimicking them, he would say in sarcasm, “Psychology, the science of human theology, excuses homosexuals. Does the fault lie with parents who didn’t discipline their children?” Anything to igni
te discussion, yet, for the most part he was ignored.
A couple of years later in July 1976, the French physician-priest, Marc Oraison, made public his homosexuality. In his announcement, Oraison declared homosexual love was God’s will.
Luciani warned Oraison in a public release, “If a priest preaches as he does, everything is ruined.”22
Of the things he said of homosexuality, this was the most widely published because right wing factions took it as a condemnation.
Luciani’s remark obviously meant Oraison should have kept his identity private. One can best help an oppressed people by appearing to be an outsider; one was far less effective if one appears to be trying to help oneself.
A few days after the Oraison incident he was asked by a reporter why he helped “those kinds of people?”
Alluding to the quarter of a million homosexuals murdered in concentration camps, he replied, “If we are ever to be truly free, we must stamp out what Hitler stood for once and for all.”23
“…their liberty oppressed…”
In 1978, Paul VI permitted him to address Vatican cardinals on the possibility the Church encourage homosexuals to enter into long term loving relationships as they represented the only population group large enough to provide loving and economic support to millions of children who otherwise would be aborted by women too young or too poor to afford them.
Luciani argued the Church’s position exiled them from society, forcing them into loneliness and despair. He reasoned the Church’s position was one of prejudice, as science had proved the condition cannot be changed and the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts was scant compared to its vast condemnation of heterosexual acts.
Yet, he was able to convince no more than a handful of his audience the matter should even be discussed. He thanked Paul for having given him the opportunity. Turning to the cardinals he took on a rare tone of bitterness, “‘The day is not far off when we will have to answer to these people who through the years have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose human dignity has been offended, their identity denied and their liberty oppressed.’ What is more, we will have to answer to the God who made them.”24
The innocence of sex
Concerning what he considered to be a more important issue, he became outspoken about the population explosion. He argued the Church’s ban on contraception was creating massive poverty and starvation in the poor countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa.
What’s more, its position on birth control was resulting in untimely pregnancies forcing abortions in the United States and Europe. The Church’s policy on birth control was in direct conflict with its policy on abortion; the Church, itself, was the underlying cause of the lion’s share of abortions.
What changes he would have made had he lived will never be known. What one does know is that he died on the eve of the time he would have lifted the Church’s ban on contraception. One knows this for he could have never rid the world of poverty—his number one objective—unless he first eliminated the driving force behind it.
On April 11, 1970, Luciani told his priests, “It is easy to find persons who use the pill and other contraceptives and do not believe they are sinning. If this were to happen it would be best not to disturb them… There has rarely been such a difficult question for the Church, particularly, in the intrinsic implications as it affects other doctrinal issues…”25
“Other doctrinal issues” struck at the heart of papal power. According to canon law only a pope can determine who can have sex without committing sin and who cannot.
This is what defines morality in the Church. According to doctrine, all sex outside what an incumbent pope defines as marriage is mortal sin—masturbation, remarriage, homosexuality, etc.
By definition, a Catholic is one who believes only a pope can decide who can have sex without committing sin and who cannot—the reason why, today, tens of millions of good Catholics, having made a mistake in choosing a mate at age twenty, at thirty had fallen truly in love, are living out their lives in loneliness and despair.
Christ did not give this authority to the pope. Men who were convinced sex is sinful, dirty and shameful made it up. Yet, take this unique power away and a pope is just another man.
The Council of Trent which today defines morality in the Roman Church rises and falls on the premise all sex is evil. So much so, it explicitly subordinates marriage to celibacy, ‘If one saith that the marriage state is to be placed above the state of virginity, or of celibacy, and that it is not more blessed to remain in virginity or celibacy, than to be in matrimony, let him be excommunicated.’26
Whereas, compassionate of homosexuals, Luciani was no more compassionate of them than he was of those who had remarried outside the Church, those heterosexuals who engaged in sex who had never married or those had not reached the age of marriage, who were equally condemned by the central moral doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church: all sex outside of marriage is mortal sin.26
In his mind, homosexuals were not a minority as they claimed— together with their allies they were in the majority.
His secretary in Venice was Mario Senigaglia. Senigaglia and Luciani spent much of their free time discussing the morality of sex. “He was an understanding man,” recalls Senigaglia, “He would say to teenagers, ‘We have made of sex the greatest of sins, whereas in itself it is human nature and not a sin at all.’ He would say to youth groups, ‘Always think of sex as being good and beautiful - a gift from God. But, also keep in mind, as with all other gifts from God, it comes with responsibility, both to yourself and your loved ones.’27
“He would counsel couples contemplating marriage that it is irresponsible not to engage in sex before marriage. ‘Sex is a complex issue,’ he would tell them. ‘Unlike Mother Church might pretend, it is not the whole of marriage. Yet, being incidental to marriage, it is prudent to test the waters before one drowns.’”27
David Yallop describes Villot discussing contraception with John Paul I. He quotes the new pope responding, “Eminence, what can we old celibates really know of the sexual desires of the married?” 28
In general, Luciani could not understand how a group of old men in Rome, who had never been in the bedroom, could take it upon themselves to tell others what they can or cannot do in the bedroom.
Marriage
Traditionally, marriage had been a contract between a man and a man—a barter in which the merchandise was a maiden. Falling in love had little to do with it. It was common for a man to trade his daughter for a horse and believe he got the better part of the deal.
Marriage was a one-way street which purpose was to satisfy the lust of the man and grow his property—children.
In the nineteenth century, woman gained recognition as a human being and was no longer the mere property Moses had declared her to be. The definition of marriage changed from being a business transaction to being a union of two people who are mutually in love.
We are talking here of society and not of the Church.
The definition of marriage within the Church remains today as it was first written into canon law in the seventh century: permission to have sex without committing sin. According to canon law, the sole purpose of the Sacrament of Matrimony is to satisfy the body—lust. It has nothing to do with the mind—love.
What demonstrates marriage in the Church is a union of the body—lust, and not of the mind—love, is its dogma condemning transsexuals. A person determined by the psychological community to be a woman born into a man’s body cannot marry a man; she can only marry another woman.
That marriage in the Church serves only to satisfy the body’s lust and has nothing to do with love is also demonstrated in that no Catholic priest will marry a paraplegic or other person handicapped in such a way one cannot consummate sex.29
That satisfaction of body lust and not procreation is the purpose of marriage in the Church is most clearly demonstrated in that every Catholic priest will marry a man and a woman well b
eyond their childbearing years into their nineties and beyond.
Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century falling in love began to define marriage in society. Yet, it still had to negotiate the hurdles society placed upon it: creed, race, social status, and so forth. A Jewish girl who fell in love with a Christian man could not marry him. Nationalities were involved. A Pole could not marry a Russian and so forth. Age was a factor. The man had to be older—yet, not much older—than the woman. If the woman was older it was frowned upon. Even if the engagement passed all the tests of society, it still had to pass the will of the family or the two could not marry. One had to choose between one’s family and one’s happiness. This was true of everyone, those at the top and those at the bottom.
There occurred an event that would ignite a revolution which further changed the definition of marriage. Marriage would no longer be the decision of others or for that matter the state. It would be solely the decision of two people who love each other. It would be an individual decision and not the decision of the majority. It would be the duty of the state to sanction the individual commitment of two people who are in love, no matter who those people were.
On December 10, 1936, Edward VIII, King of England, told the world, “I abdicate my throne for the woman I love.”
Edward had been engaged to Wallis Simpson, a divorcee who was not of royal blood. He had sought the approval of his family, the Church of England and the political establishment to no avail.
Albino was twenty-four when Edward abdicated. In Edward he saw courage, the same kind of courage his mother had shown when she had married his socialist-atheist father a quarter of a century earlier. In marrying a renegade, she too had given up her family.
As keynote speaker in the summer of 1961 at commencement services of his seminary in Vittorio Veneto, he spoke of how mental energy is exchanged between two people who are in love.
“…Though the Bible’s only account of ‘falling in love’ involves two men—It came to pass…the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul,’ 30— it applies to everyone.
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